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The 2000 Beanies

Category: Best Open Source Text Editor 114

Posted by CmdrTaco from the let-the-carnage-begin dept.
Nobody loves a good old fashioned vi/emacs war more than me, so we decided to create a category in the Slashdot 2000 Beanies just as an excuse to have a flamewar! Nominate your favorite text editor, and let the good times roll.
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Category:Best Open Source Text Editor More

Category:Best Open Source Text Editor

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  • perl (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My favorite text editor is Perl. Think of all the times you've used perl to edit textfiles. 'Nuff said.

  • How to remember how to quit VI. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ESC = Escape this
    : = colon thing (everyone knows what a colon also could be, right?)
    q = quit and do
    ! = NOT
    RETURN = return.

    Instead use ED, the only editor with a easy to learn user interface. You only need to learn the ? character.

  • cat (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I love this quote:
    "It always amazed me that Bill's favorite editor is the UNIX cat command."
    James Gosling on Bill Joy
    http://java.sun.com/j avaone/keynotes/transcripts/schmidt.html [sun.com]

  • vim (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The vim [vim.org] editor (vi improved), complete with its gvim graphical incarnation and its perl and python plug-ins.

  • vim!!!!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Off course, vim is _the_ text editor to use! fast, cool and easy...
  • Indent a region? Vi users are an easy-to-plesae bunch, aren't they?

    To indent an entire file that's compressed and sitting on a machine in the other hemisphere:

    C-x C-f /user@host:path/to/file.c.gz RET emacs fetches, gunzipps and colorizes your source
    C-x h select the entire contents of the file
    C-M-\ indent the file (M-x indent-region if you prefer)
    C-x C-s save the file

    ...how can you call vi a programmer's editor if you can't program it?

    -Pez

  • It can be naught but vi, the true editor

  • vim does indeed rule! I like the syntax highlighting, automatic C style indenting that recognises the beginning and end of {}s, and so forth. Now if only someone would port perl-style regexps to it.

    --Alex
  • Staroffice works really nice for me. The whole student club I attend will enjoy 50 pages of staroffice-made official statutes for the next 10 years. Also I use the spreadsheet quite often in my study.

    But: it's not open source, so it doesn't qualify. But still, I use it till better stuff arives (kde office keeps sounding wonderful!)

    greetings,

    Reinout

  • Bring out your dead!

    • old beaten horses
    • VI's killed -9 because no-one knew they had to press ESC q! ENTER
    • those who died of fright seeing emacs' sytax

    Bring out your dead!

    greetings,

    Reinout

    btw: i use emacs :-)

  • this understates it just a bit, if disk space is an issue. emacs is one of the largest packages on any linux dist -- nearly as big as X. Here are some stats from redhat rpms:

    bcboy-linux 238 ...bcboy/redhat/RedHat/RPMS> du -c `rpm -qa | grep XFree | perl -ne 'chop; print "$_.i386.rpm\n"'`

    906 XFree86-Xnest-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
    317 XFree86-cyrillic-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
    1294 XFree86-SVGA-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
    1108 XFree86-Xvfb-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
    851 XFree86-libs-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
    237 XFree86-xfs-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
    7087 XFree86-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
    1255 XFree86-100dpi-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
    1084 XFree86-75dpi-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
    1917 XFree86-devel-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
    16056 total
    bcboy-linux 239 ...bcboy/redhat/RedHat/RPMS> du -c emac*
    6250 emacs-20.3-15.i386.rpm
    1021 emacs-X11-20.3-15.i386.rpm
    5700 emacs-el-20.3-15.i386.rpm
    1386 emacs-leim-20.3-15.i386.rpm
    914 emacs-nox-20.3-15.i386.rpm
    15271 total
    bcboy-linux 240 ...bcboy/redhat/RedHat/RPMS> du -c vim*
    689 vim-X11-5.3-7.i386.rpm
    1382 vim-common-5.3-7.i386.rpm
    641 vim-enhanced-5.3-7.i386.rpm
    249 vim-minimal-5.3-7.i386.rpm
    2961 total


    ... on small systems, emacs is the first thing to go.

    There's also the issue that you have to know vi, anyway, if you do much system work: fitting emacs on a recovery disk is not fun. vim gives you advanced features w/o having to use a completely different editor during system recovery, or on space constrained systems.

  • URL..? (Score:1)

    by Coolio ( 5472 )
    Do you have a URL for that? I'm always keen to test pilot new Emacsen.

  • Main Entry: maculation
    Function: noun
    Date: 15th century
    1 archaic : the state of being spotted
    2 a : a blemish in the form of a discrete spot
    b : the arrangement of spots and markings on an animal or plant
  • It's not just the speed.. vi follows the 'Do one thing and do it well' philosophy of unix more truly than emacs. vi is a fantastic text editor.. able to conquer large codebases in a fraction of a second. emacs does damned near everything except sort socks. In fact, I'm probably wrong about that. There's probably some lisp code out there that enables emacs to sort socks. My bad.

  • nano (Score:1)

    by astyanax ( 8365 )
    Yup, again I'm nominating my own project, not for the sake of nominating it but so I can get the word out about it and get help/patches =-)

    nano [plattsburgh.edu] - nano's another editor, a GPLed pico clone with a few enhancements.
  • If you take the half second to be a hard core nerd and learn vi you can do things in seconds that it takes Emacs 10 minutes to do after coding in LISP.

  • I don't think I could live without this editor, and my rc file for it. It does everything, is tiny, and extremely configurable.
  • I'd have to say Kwite too. Infact I do most of my coding now in Kwrite (The rest in Kdevelop which embeds kwrite I believe).

    Its small fast, does syntax highlighting for nearly everything and is extremely easy to use. The "open recent" feature is really handy. It has everything I need in a code editor.

    Kudos to Jochen Wilhelmy (digisnap@cs.tu-berlin.de) for this lovely little editor!

  • ...so I'l vote for ed. The One True Editor.

    /Do a s/(emacs)|(vi)/ed/ on the rest of the discussion, and you do the world a favor :)

  • Re:. (Score:1)

    by Audin ( 17719 )
    Just don't try to edit anything over 64K...

    If you're stuck in windows, PFE is probably the way to go. Unless you've installed Emacs, of course.
  • Probably because I learned vi cold when I first started programming. I like vim because it's relatively small, has a GUI version, and runs on winbloze. The ctags support, syntax coloring, help system, and mouse support meet my needs very well. Every time I've noticed that I'm in "the zone" while editing source code I'm using vi or vim.

    I have used emacs (short for Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift) quite a bit but 1) it's modelessness got in the way, at least for me, and 2). it's a kitchen sink editor/email/news/browser/... application and I prefer my applications to be focused on one thing. I know lots of people love emacs and that's AOK with me.

    The bottom line is you use what works for you. For me it's vim.

    mkg

  • naaa, enter the command as i wrote, and type away.
    every time you hit enter, you'll get the translation.

    oh, to catch capitals you need of course:tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M

    greetings, eMBee
    --
    --

  • try
    tr a-z n-za-m

    greetings, martin.
    --

  • joe a dumb term is such beautiful site. I need no colors. Just think of all the cruff that would have to be added ta add support for this language or that language. O'well

  • It's funny. From time to time one of my students will wander by after school and catch me coding something full-screen in vi, with syntax highlighting. Many of my upper-level students who watch for a minute or two will usually cry out:

    Student: Hey! How'd you do that?
    Me: (puzzled) What?
    Student: Those ten lines just changed indentation level all at once! And you didn't even move!
    Me: Yeah, that's vi for you.
    Student: vi can do that?
    Me: vi can do anything, once you learn how.

    You know a text editor is good when people walking by will actually stop to watch you use it. Tom Christiansen was right, vi isn't just an editor, it's a game [slashdot.org] (a "rogue-variant", to quote him more accurately).

    And while I'm at it, another thing I like about vi is that I can have it installed on every machine I own and it looks just the same everywhere. Consistency is good, IMO.

  • I humbly suggest Efuns, which is an editor based on the design philosophy of Emacs, but rewritten from the ground up in Objective Caml (with some C in the necessary places). Yes, you can use advanced, powerful, type-safe "academic" programming languages to write Real Programs! And the Ocaml group [inria.fr] at INRIA recently placed all of the Ocaml system under Open Source licenses -- LGPL for the runtime, QPL for the rest of it. Efuns is available here [inria.fr].
  • yes..joe is nice. i use it for any edition under linux for 4 years now.. wordstar compatible keyboard layout (even thought it can emulate pico (jpico or emacs jmacs). it is small fast reliable and has good formating rules when edition emails (line breaking in > > > quoted paragraphs etc etc..) no color no syntax highlighting thought..

    mond.


  • And that's not the only brain dead restriction:

    - You don't see any line numbers.
    - You can't search & replace
    - There is no hot key for searching, you
    always have to go over the menus.
    - It can't handle unix mode (LF only) files.
    - TABs are always 8 bytes wide.

    I can understand if someone wants to express
    his l33tness by listing notepad as the favorite
    editor, but I don't think anyone actually
    uses it for bigger projects cause it's a pain
    in the ass.

    Emacs runs quite nicely on Windows (although
    it seems to have some problems with accessing
    files from the network neighbourhood), XEmacs
    is unstable as hell on Win32.
  • I have been using vim for a little more than a year now and find it to be much better than emacs. Sure, you can tweak emacs, but you can also tweak vim. Most of the vim commands are single keys whereas emacs requires key combos to do much of anything. At work this summer I found vim to be essential for making changes to large sections of code. It is easy to develop macros to speed things up in vim. I believe that vim and emacs are relatively equal in abilities but vim is so much faster and simpler. Sure it has a learning curve but if you try to use it you will find it to become natural quite quickly. Also, I find the configuration to be easier. I stoped using emacs because I couldn't figure out how to make it stop autoformatting my C code. I think the default emacs formatting is messy. Emacs also tried its hardest to prevent me from commenting my assembly code. When I would type a semicolon emacs would automatically move to the beginning of the line and comment out the code. This was a major pain. vim has made my life easy. - enarT
  • Pico is nice for email because of word-wrapping and smart ">>" handling, but it doesn't beat vim IMHO because it has:
    • No syntax highlighting
    • No keyboard macros
    • Cumbersome cursor movement
      • No skip word, sentence, etc.
      • No find matching brakets
      • No jump to line number
    • No tab size adjustment
    • No integration with "make" or "man"
    • No search & replace

    --
    Patrick Doyle

  • No wacked commands to remember.

    Can handle any latin based text.

    Any strong man can operate.

    All these other wanna-be's don't hold a candle to it!!

  • I agree, Joe has simple key bindings that are
    common enough that (if only in the doze/dos world)
    most people don't have to relearn them. It's
    powerful enough for programming purposes, yet it
    doesn't masquarade as an entire operating system
    like some editors. It's small, fast, simple,
    and powerful enough for almost all tasks. What more
    can you ask for in an editor?
  • Well yes, color syntax highlighting, but I
    think that that tends to be bloatware anyway,
    ^G tells me if brackets match and the rest tends
    to be eye candy. Syntax highlighting has it's
    place, it is very useful at times, but it's not
    something I need continously. I use emacs when
    things just start to get too hairy, but thats
    maybe 1ce a year. Joe is lean, simple and usable,
    and I there is nothing I can point to and say:
    "I'd really like to change...."
  • Well...there's ease of use for newbies.

    I love vim/vi (don't get me wrong), but I think that "ease of use for newbies" isn't a feature I'd attribute to either vi or emacs. When I want to recommend an editor for someone who's not a heavy UNIXer, I'd more likely recommend something along the lines of Pico -- something that has a smaller command-set and a design that meshes better with the "word processor" mental model that most people have been trained to carry around.

    For expert users, emacs and vi are two great tools; as soon as I was comfortable with a modest number of commands in vi I began to see the limitations of Pico, Notepad, and other typically word-processorish programs (which I'd never want to use for wading through code--or through anything else, by now!). Both offer good ways of remembering commands (vi mnemonics, emacs command-names and bindings (sorry, I wish I knew enough Emacs to offer better examples)), and both are customizable enough that you can easily get at all the commands you use most often. For me the deciding factors were the speed of vi and the efficiency of its mnemonics.

    (okay, my one semi-OT gripe (I'm sure the Emacs folk could see this one coming): lispmode kinda sucks. Any Vimmers out there got a suggestion on how I can customize things to improve it?)

  • Pico is good :) simple :)

    Chris Hagar
  • Jnvg n frpbaq, ner lbh frevbhfyl gryyvat zr gung V'z gur bayl crefba ba /. jub pna fvtug-ernq ebg-13?
    --
    "HORSE."
  • ...Ed! [gnu.org] Ed! is the standard text editor! Ed, man! !man ed
    --
    "HORSE."

  • Jed, the programmer's editor [mit.edu], is the best open-source editor. Why?

    • No ESC key needed.
    • Help and menus available if you forget your key bindings
    • Key bindings are configurable.
    • Reasonable size and footprint (i.e. it fits in one package instead of a disk series, *cough*emacs*cough)
    • Good syntax highlighting
    • Available for both Linux, DOS, and Win32 (though I've had some problems under Win2k)--this is vital for those of us that work in MS-based places. One of my biggest gripes about the Win32 OS line is the lack of a good text editor anywhere. edit.com comes pretty close, but it isn't graphical and copy-and-paste gets weird (though the latter can also be a problem with the DOS version of Jed in a DOS box, the Windows version works pretty well).

    In case you missed the link above, the homepage is at http://space.mit.edu/~davis/jed.html [mit.edu].

  • Oh, come on, pleeeeese!!!!

    Outdated modes? What exactly outdated the
    command/command-line/text mode? Alt and Ctrl
    were *always* available. On the contrary, now
    that computers are much faster then humans, having an editor which is fast to use (never move the fingers away from the keyboard) is a much, much bigger advantage.

    BTW:
    You do know you don't need Motif for NEdit? Lesstif would do quite nicely, thank you very much.
  • wanna post some screenshots?
  • SO what if it isn't open sourced? It is the best by far, from everythign I've used. Are there any real equivilents that ARE opensourced? I've been looking for a while! I currently use a linux server with appletalk and appleshare IP running and use bbedit to edit my linux files. That's all I use the mac for!

    Until I find another editor that shows my perl code's functions in a drop down, I can't switch!
  • If you're going to get an editor that has everything including the Kitchen Sink in it, why not go for the luxury version with gold-plated taps & plug-chain, and which is built from solid marble?

    Nothing exceeds like excess!

  • you can also use "dd of=/dev/hda1 ..." or even magnets :)

    but personally, I like xfte and code crusader. I also like the DOS edit.com


  • Well, I do email-stuff with mutt, browse the
    web with my web browser, use the zshell as interactive shell, tetris to play tetris, *VIM* to edit texts (vi, if vim is not installed)... the list goes on and on.

    In other words: For every job I use the best
    tools available and not a single mediocre tool for every job. Do you see Formula-one mechanics changing wheels with swiss-army knife like "one-for-everything" tools?
  • This "unsung hero" of editors has just the right combination of features for the busy UNIX system administrator. All of the keystrokes of the original EMACS, a non-modal and easy-to-learn interface, almost instantaneous startup, a great tutorial, and a tiny, tiny fraction of the footprint of the bloated GNU Emacs. Once I've told them it's available and explained what it does, the majority of our GNU Emacs users have switched. (The only holdouts are the ones that use GNU Emacs for functions for which dedicated programs are really better -- for example, to read mail, news, etc.)

    --Brett Glass

  • yep, cast my vote for that one too...

    I came over the DOSland ~ 1995 and just needed a good editor. Slackware included jed, and I was hooked. I -STILL- use it wherever I go, and I keep turning more and more people onto it (and slackware for that matter)

    John E Davis did a hell of a job on this one, and the new menuing system is very very cool and useful. I wish more people would realize it's not just an "emacs clone".. it's a lot more powerful.

    cast my vote for the unsung editor, JED.

    PM.
  • http://darklife.org/fte.jpg [darklife.org] -- The quality is not that good, I prefered to keep the size down, have a look, I'm using "xfce" as a window manager for the curious.

  • FTE! (Score:1)

    by yist ( 100285 )
    I have been using "FTE" for several months now, and I absolutely love it!

    It features color syntax highlighting for C/C++, HTML,PERL, TEX, and many more, multiple file/window editing, column blocks, configurable menus and keyboard bindings, mouse support, undo/redo, regular expression search and replace, folding, as well as background compiler execution.

    [Stolen from freshmeat entry-- sue me.]

    Visit fte's homepage and give it a try. [uni-lj.si]
  • since the first time i used *nix i felt in love with joe. and joe is something i'm using still, everyday, in different tasks. forget emacs and vi ;)
  • XEmacs can show your perl code functions in a drop down as well as in a separate buffer!
    So switch alread :] : http://www.xemacs.org
  • and email client, and web browser, and shell, and tetris game... the list goes on and on.
  • I use nedit at university, and it seems to have the most annoying bugs:
    i.e.
    CTRL-S crashes the program sometimes (This is the shortcut for saving);(

    The shortcut keys also dont seem to work with Num-Lock on.
    Very annoying.

    Stick to PICO. :)
    It works.
  • The University Im at uses redhat 6.1, so I'd presume that they had the latest version of Lesstif (unsure) I didnt think Redhat supplied Nedit. Also where can I get the latest version of nedit from. Is it easy to install, for newbies =). Who have just installed the latest distro of Redhat Debian Corel? KDE editor I found was simple to install, and use when programming, for parsing. I couldn't even find a copy of Nedit (probably my fault :( ) I was just pointing out my few gripes with the program which I suspect most ppl would have. Sorry if I offended anyone. :(

  • CE (Score:1)

    by toilet ( 109827 )
    emacs clone, smaller executable than vi, nuff spread
  • > What more could you want?

    Well... there's ease of use for newbies, perhaps a smaller memory footprint, a proper GUI, default key bindings which don't cause RSI, and extensibility without having to learn LISP.

    The key thing I want from a text editor is the ability to edit text in a nice way, not embedded news readers or psychoanalysis software.

    Emacs is very impressive, but I feel the design has been in need of modernisation since window systems made it unnecessary to do everything in one program.

    -- Lightstorm.

  • Hmmm, I'd rather it didn't use Motif myself. For one thing, Motif isn't free so you have to consume memory with statically linked libraries or use Lesstif instead.

    What about Qt? Motif looks positively old fashioned next to Qt. I'd also love to see the extra level of key binding translation used by Motif be removed from nedit (osfPageUp etc).

    Nedit is a great editor though, that would be my choice too.

    -- Lightstorm.

  • Notepad for Win9x has a 32k limit on the size of the text box and can't change font or search and replace. Notepad in WinNT, however, has unlimited text size and it can search-n-replace and you can even change the font. Unfortunatly, the WinNT version of Notepad won't run on Win9x (I've tried).

    However, I use PICO all the time on my Linux server and love it. Quick, Simple, Fast, Easy.

    -BK
  • >It can be naught but vi, the true editor ed is the true editor, not that i'd use it. --
  • cat. If you need more editing power, you have a design problem, not an editor problem.
  • Personally, I think it is vi (my favorite clone is vim [vim.org]).

    I can see why people like emacs, but personally, I think it's too bloated for my taste.

    vim has syntax highlighting for most any language, auto-indention, and other stuff. I just love using all the vim command mode commands. Like if I mistyped an entire word, I just bcw. Sure, there is something like it, which means that you have to leave the text panel. Esc is an exception, but you use it only when going in to command mode.

    I *know* there is a vi workalike for emacs, but I just dont use those featubcwbells and whistles emacs offers me.

    vim is what a text editor should have been. it edits text, and it's quick to use.

    It's not a text editor with bloat, psychoanalysts, and the kitchen sink. We're just missing a login prompt and a boot loader for emacs to make it a complete operating system.

    Remember, that these opinions are my own, and I'm in no way classifying emacs users as idiots. Feel free to be psychoanalysed in your text editor if that's your way of life, and you actually use a millionth of the features.

  • No argument needed.
    Colored highlighting for C on
    top of emacs.
    Definitley superior to vi.
    right on guys!
    -Ryan
  • Sure it's better than notepad in windows! But thats not saying anything. Gnome is cool but the functionality of Emacs and JED kick the crap out of gedit. I used to use it for schoolwork:)
  • Pico's a gret console based ed. It started life as the message editor of pine, but there is now a separate executable for it. All the functions are via control keys, in the familiar pine sytlie. It's small, it's quick and a lurve it.
  • Frankly, the world could use another open source text editor. I like Emacs well enough and use it quite a bit but it would be refreashing to see something new. Something without all the bloat and all of the increasingly anacronistic controls. And something that was designed to compile on multiple platforms from the get-go (Abiword has done this rather well but it's a word processor).

    For instance, a new editor should be designed from the biggining with a GUI. I'm a huge fan of CLIs, but with text editing GUIs buy you a few nice features: squigly red underlines for mispelled words, pop-up boxes representing choices for automatic completion of member functions etc. Pull-down menus for functions, classes etc.

    Most of this stuff should be controlable since I recognize that not everyone wants all this crap cluttering up thier display all the time.

    And while I'm on it, it would be nice to see some sort of XML standard that specified basic text editor prefs and syntax highlighting settings. That way, prefs could be more easily transported from one compliant text editor to another. Many text editors are powerful but it's litterally useless if people don't know how to use it. This might help a little.

    -gsh

  • Ok, I hate to say this but different editors are vastly useful for different applications.
    So these are my votes:

    pico -> for quick editing of small or unimportant files which do not require formatting. (eg. most config files)

    emacs -> for general coding and editing of large text files

    vi -> for when you are introducing new users to *nix systems. It will certainly test their (memory) skills and patience and prove whether or not they are fit to evolve to a higher level of computing beyond MS.

    echo "..." >> filename -> great when you really fuck something up on your system and need to regain minimal functionality (ie. setting PATH) without having to type in entire path names to executables. Also good for minimal coding from a rescue disk.

    FDE
  • Lots of Linux users think this about nedit, because Debian and Red Hat put up versions of it paired with early releases of Lesstif. NEdit is only really stable with Lesstif .89.4 and later. There were statically linked (Motif) versions available, but the Linux distributions wouldn't touch them. As a result, lots of people saw those versions and think nedit is crappy and unstable, when it's actually one of the most reliable applications around. NEdit is coming up on a major new release, which is now out in alpha test. As of 5.1, nedit will be under the GPL license, and fully validated with Lesstif. The combination of NEdit with Lesstif is now as rock-solid as the original Motif version was, and 100% GPL.
  • That's interesting. I use a Dvorak layout, but since I never use vi, I never noticed the problem you describe. I suppose it's good that I happened to learn emacs then.

    [ Note to vi supporters: I'm not so biased that I won't learn vi eventually. I just don't think it will become my editor of choice. Besides, the text editor flame war is always a good hoot. :) ]

  • It's got 6,000 keyboard shortcuts, it's extensible in LISP, and you can get it to psychoanalyze Zippy. What more could you want? :)

    (BTW: That's M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead.)

  • Okay, here is my extremely informal data based upon a P-166 w/ 96 Meg of RAM:
    [Note: All tests were performed with the console version of the editor inside an xterm.]

    Editor Load Time Memory Usage
    --------------------------------
    emacs 0.79 s 2800 KB
    vim 0.40 s 1400 KB

    So, yes, I will concede that Emacs is bigger and slower. But, I'm a LISP freak, and I like being able to tweak the editor in crazy ways without having to recompile it. On the whole, the difference in memory and speed does not matter to me (.39 s per load * 1000 loads per year = 6.5 minutes wasted per year).

  • "pico -w" will turn off the goofy line wrapping.
  • emacs is one of the largest packages on any linux dist --
    nearly as big as X.
    Only nearly? Emacs is the greatest off all programs! If it temporarily doesn't reflect on its size, that will be fixed with Emacs 21.
  • Unfortunetely, the one thing vi does well is text maculation. So it doesn't qualify in the text editor category.
  • if only it did color syntax highlighting. *sigh*

    --

  • NEdit is the only editor on Unix which combines all the following characteristics:

    • Is stable enough
    • Has a sensible GUI
    • Isn't too bloated
    • and at the same time does'nt have outdated modes (ESC anyone?)
    • Decent highlighting
    • No significant graphical glitches
    • Is dynamically resizable without annyoing flicker

    Too bad it uses Motif ...

  • The award should go to Keith Bostic [bostic.com], for nvi [bostic.com]. Surely this is obvious? I'm sure all these other editors are very nice, but why reinvent the wheel?
  • Vim, of course! I was an emacs junkie for several years before I got tired of LISP and om-my-god-I-need-fourteen-fingers-for-this-command style editing. As for features, there really is nothing I miss in vim compared to emacs.
  • Everybody is saying vi, but WHICH vi? I heartily nominate elvis!

    Smaller than vim, coolest name, best compatibility, and often seen in laundrymats. Besides which, it is default on Slackware, and nothing more needs saying.
  • Joe is also by far my favorite. Features like intelligent paragraph formatting (preserving "> >" at the beginning of lines), being able to handle all sorts of unprintable characters, huge files, histories on text prompts, and it includes 'jmacs', 'jstar' and 'jpico'. It also has 'rjoe' for restricted environments.

    Yes, it's WordStarish, but it's easy to learn, and very configurable.

    "vi has two modes. One in which it beeps, and one in which it doesn't."
  • Okay. I'm torn between Pico and Star Office. Star Office clearly is the *best* open source text editor from a technological point of view. However, Pico really has done a lot for me, and the fact that I use it all the time gives it my vote.

    Major pico complaint: Wrapping of long lines.

  • mcedit (Score:2)

    by jfunk ( 33224 )
    I used to use VI a lot when I first started using Linux. Now I use mcedit most of the time.

    F4... ahhh, syntax-highlighting, keys that sort-of coincide with mc keys.

    Quick, simple, no macros but I never bothered with that anyway.
  • Vim. How can anybody say otherwise with a straight face?


    All the programmers functionality in a tight package, and compatible with vi.


    If you only want to learn an editor once, vim is the way to go.

    ----
    Wind and temp at my house [halcyon.com]

  • That's fine once you have a file, or at least something to pipe to stdin, but we are talking about a comic strip. I had to retype the text by hand. That requires a text editor. Okay, it doesn't require a text editor. The really masochistic can do it with adb.
  • Okay, I'm biased [realtime1.com]. But what other tool so obviously solves the problem of decoding a rot13'ed comic strip [userfriendly.org]. M-x toggle-rot13-mode.

  • vim ! (Score:2)

    by arnim ( 117833 )
    ever since i used vim the 1st time i've been thinking zillion times in any other text-editor "damn, this X minutes work would have been :%s/"%$"%%$/&$&$/goi; in vim now"

    ~
    ~
    ~
    ~
    "submission.html" 12 lines, 723 characters

  • Pico! (Score:3)

    by Kurt Gray ( 935 ) on Monday January 03, 2000 @08:04AM (#1411934) Homepage Journal
    Pico is:

    - small
    - simple
    - useful
    - fast
    - included. If you've got pine, you've got pico.

  • I have to at least suggest TECO (Score:3)

    by dsplat ( 73054 ) on Monday January 03, 2000 @12:09PM (#1411935)
    Yes, TECO. To quote Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal [pbm.com]:

    Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been incorporated into editors running on more reasonably named operating systems-- EMACS and VI being two. The problem with these editors is that Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in Women. No, the Real Programmer wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor-- complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous. TECO, to be precise.

    It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission line noise than readable text[4]. One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse-- introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine.

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